As prepared for delivery

Kyiv/New York, 10, September 2026

This is my second full day in Ukraine.

I have spent the day in discussions with the Ministers of Finance, Infrastructure, and Communities and was at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

I will meet the Prime Minister and other senior officials later today and tomorrow.

UNDP works closely with all of them.

Since the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, we have stood alongside the people of Ukraine, together with our international partners.

With one goal: to help Ukrainians withstand the brutal realities of this war and to keep daily life going.

As UNDP, we have the largest operational presence in Ukraine of the UN system. Five hundred colleagues are delivering results every day, across the country, in all oblasts.

To date, we have mobilized $1.3 billion for our work in Ukraine.

I thank every one of our partners for making that work possible. 

In particular, I want to recognize our five largest donors: Norway, Japan, the European Union, Sweden and Denmark.

1. Energy

A major part of our work is focused on energy. 

As Ukraine prepares for the fifth winter since this full-scale invasion, that work is becoming even more urgent.

Winters here are tough. 

Russia’s sustained attacks have impacted roughly half of Ukraine’s power-generation capacity.

And touches people in their everyday life. 

Energy is heating at home.

But it is also hospitals functioning, schools remaining open and clean drinking water continuing to flow.

Without energy, the essentials of daily life stop.

Through our work, 6.6 million people have maintained access to electricity, heating, water and sanitation.

We are repairing what has been damaged. 

But we are also building better.

We are helping build a system that is harder to attack, through more decentralized energy generation.

And one that is cleaner and ready for the future, through renewable energy.

Yesterday, we inaugurated a solar power facility at Chornobyl. 

With support from Lithuania and Japan, it will provide power for essential safety systems at the site, including the cooling of Reactor 4.

I also entered the protective structure built around the reactor that was destroyed in the disaster of 1986 and saw the damage caused by last year’s drone strike.

Anyone attacking nuclear infrastructure is gambling with millions of lives. 

Nuclear facilities are not military targets, and they must never be attacked.

There can be no excuse and no ambiguity about that. Full stop.

2. Protecting civilians

Let me conclude with one impression from my first two days in Kyiv.

I see extraordinary courage.

I see resilience.

And I see a Ukrainian people determined to keep living, working and rebuilding.

But I also see the nature of this war changing.

The frontline is no longer only in the east or the south.

The frontline is everywhere.

Civilian infrastructure is being attacked deliberately and relentlessly, day and night.

Buses. Trains. Bookshops. Supermarkets. The ordinary places where ordinary people live their lives.

It is a calculated attempt to terrorize people, to make normal life impossible.

It violates international humanitarian law and the most basic rules of war.

After the Second World War, the United Nations was created to save future generations from the horrors of war and to defend our common humanity.

Those principles are now being tested in Ukraine.

I condemn these attacks without any qualification.

Civilians are not military targets.

Civilian infrastructure is not a legitimate target.

There can be no excuse, no ambiguity and no impunity.